


OLL-E

by Kami



Category: LOONA (Korea Band), WALL-E (2008)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-26
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:54:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,079
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25527766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kami/pseuds/Kami
Summary: After the humans fled Earth, things became very quiet for a very long time, almost everything they had created in their tenure falling into disrepair. But one little android left behind went on doing what she had always done... and a little bit more... for hundreds of thousands of mostly changeless days. For Go Won, never designed to mark the passage of time, the number of days hardly matter. The planet's emptiness hardly matters. Her life is organised, with few mysteries.Then one day, something new arrives on Earth. A stranger who is complicated, destructive, searching. Olivia Hye has a mission, and the will to destroy anything that gets in the way of her completing it. But it will fall to Go Won to attempt to untangle the mystery of this warrior android's true intentions as nobody ever has before, to stand by her side on Earth and beyond as a plan 700 years in the making comes to fruition.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 19





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My son once managed to watch WALL-E three times in one day. This story was my way of coping.

Centuries meant nothing, to a world where nothing remained that was conscious of time.

But time has a way of reinventing itself, even when it has been completely forgotten. With nobody there to keep to maintenance schedules, the skyscrapers and bridges began to crumble. The roads split, the earth trapped underneath them fighting back with the green force of life. The androids set to restore order to the planet slowed, and stiffened. With what was quite clearly the passage of time, nothing seemed to move with purpose any more on the surface of Earth. Time slowed again then, with the humans somewhat cleaned up after.

With this process past, only someone who had sufficient time to watch—a quantity not given to ordinary humans, that is—would have noticed the sorts of changes across the planet's surface that were not enacted by thoughtless decay. Slow changes. Down to the level of one sagging office block, where various objects that had been in one place one day would be gone the next. Here and there, paths were cleared in humanity's abandoned detritus to allow access to a particular location. A particular building's slide into obscurity was slowed overnight by props that could never have just fallen into position. Some of the Land Or Orbit Nurturing Androids—the LOONAs—who had gone silent long ago, were missing limbs, or outfits, or sparkling artificial eyes.

Sometimes, late at night, a click would echo through a deserted city, and a song rang out via a repaired or improvised audio system that had the roaches scrambling into their hiding places and then coming out to peek.

Humans had left Earth behind out of necessity, had been forced to leave much of their history and culture—even the robots they had built to save themselves—to rot... but Go Won, the last of the LOONAs to walk on the planet... continued. There was something more to her that had not been a part of all those others who rusted and ceased.

But at the end of each day, she still returned to one of the designated BlockBerry Enterprises dorms in whatever city she happened to be in. Once there, after several reviews of a short piece of video footage she found particularly compelling, in which seven female forms danced and flung coloured paint at one another in an initially pure white house, she would plug herself in to charge... and her memory and logic circuitry could not be accessed in replenishment mode, so anything like human consciousness would completely wink out for several hours.

In theory, she had a very good timekeeping chip that drifted maybe a minute in every thousand years, but nobody had ever bothered to write a few lines of code that would have given her a way of accessing its capabilities. So she had no idea how much time had passed in human terms, how long she had been out there on her own.

But it didn't matter, because she didn't have the capacity for loneliness either... though sometimes, after she had been reviewing the old video of the females dancing, it seemed to her that she was operating strangely. Something was askew in her environment detection system, and it made her move in a way that put her in places fractionally distant from her intended location, which was bothersome because she had always been particularly precise.

She could have tried methodically swapping out her sensor modules with those originally installed in other LOONAs who had run down, but there seemed to be no particular need. The fault was intermittent, difficult to troubleshoot, and there was every likelihood that meddling with her existing componentry would introduce other faults that were not so easily accepted. She might even end up like those poor silenced units she had borrowed cosmetic components from over the days and months and years as she found them in well-preserved condition with exactly what she was looking for.

Such alterations as those, at least, could at worst mildly inconvenience if the components selected were ill-fitting, but Go Won did not feel true conceit at her own appearance the way a true human might, so it was not clear to her why she made these efforts either. All she knew was that there was a satisfying delicacy and symmetry about her face and body now, and she had collected a series of dresses that had a visual impact on her hardware she could not explain: whenever she passed by her own reflection, there was a shifting inside her that sounded like _bbong bbong drrr_. It seemed like cause for moderate concern, but unlike her other troubles it was easily reproducible, and there were no attendant problems to be identified when she ran a diagnostic while generating the issue. Just something to keep reviewing regularly.

Life on Earth was not how it had been meant to be, perhaps, but it was there, and Go Won was there, and with the humans gone for the moment, being _there_ was enough to fulfil her programming. So she kept on doing what she had been doing since the first day she was activated: she wandered the streets and tried to make things look a little better than they had when she started (a fairly useless task as the humans had left things in a _state_ ), and when nobody was watching, she indulged in the 'slacking-off' part of her programming, which had won its developer many accolades once upon a time. In loosely algorithmic summary, that programming allowed the LOONAs to develop an 'interest' or _interests_ in some part of the environment they found themselves in and continue to indulge their interest on successive days, wherever possible.

The celebrated programmer would have been fascinated to see just how far that programming had managed to proceed when left alone... but, of course, she was no longer alive. None of the team that had built the LOONAs was even a memory, on Earth or elsewhere: and that included the controversial visionary who had conceptualised the project, who would probably have been more bothered than most of them if he knew.

Go Won might have been bothered if she was fully conscious of her situation: a dramatic outlier in terms of how long she had lasted, and alone out in the universe with nobody near who could offer repairing skills superior to her own capability to plug-and-play her modular components. But she had never been designed to worry about the number of others in her world or how they were able to relate to her, so from her perspective, her existence was still proceeding just as it should be.

And she had no expectation or requirement that it would ever change, although sometimes she would watch that video of the girls in their white house, and sense many new connections spawning as she noted the way they put their furniture together to climb out of it and sit apparently on the very top of the world. It was the way they brought colour out of things that Go Won was certain did not just inherently contain colour, in the non-fictional world.

Go Won didn't feel any particular need for colour in her world, although she had changed out her original straight black hair for a wavy pineapple-coloured piece she had seen on a LOONA whose face had been burned in some accident. (It was easier to adjust to seeing that as belonging to her when she didn't have the record of how it had looked when correctly installed on its original owner.) But that it had all mattered so much to those human girls she was so endlessly entertained by: noise and clutter and chaos, the very things she was designed to minimise... well, it was very interesting.


	2. Chapter 2

The rumbling brought Go Won out of her charging stasis early. Some of BlockBerry's first customers had been Japanese, and were particularly concerned about the capability of their new LOONA units to recognise earthquakes and act usefully.

She stepped forward so she was disconnected from her charging contacts. It was immediately clear that the sound waves generated by the current phenomenon were not at all in line with the pattern of an earthquake: they were coming from _above_. This was more likely to be something landing... or crashing.

There had not been either landings or crashings on Earth in recent days, but Go Won was able to access the knowledge she had on dealing with such events. She turned directly for the exit. There was a park nearby she could use as an evacuation point; given recent population figures on Earth, it was not likely to be overcrowded.

Out on the street, striding a little quicker than an average human was capable of since there were no humans present to be offended, Go Won made note of something interesting. The descending craft darkening the skies above her was conducting a landing perfectly in line with the BlockBerry terminals, now a little lopsided from minor sinking but in far better condition than many other structures in the city. They had been designed to last on a hundred-year scale—much like Go Won herself.

It was not her business to interfere in such a landing unless there seemed to be an emergency situation. Go Won continued to the evacuation location and merely watched, her skin vibrating a little as the craft broke the cloud cover and aligned itself over the top of a minor landing pad. It was one of the smaller crafts in the BlockBerry arsenal, designed to carry just one individual... and of a type that didn't mind a somewhat rough ride.

The deceleration pulses seemed to stutter, like they hadn't received their usual maintenance. A rough ride, and a bumpy landing. When the craft hit the pad, a chunk of the corner cracked and slid sideways away from the rest of the pad. The tall craft tipped just a little, and then a stabiliser in the direction of the pad breakage activated, nudging it back in the other direction. Soft whines rose in the air as the support struts adjusted, and when the last of the landing noises drifted away along with the dust from the disturbance, it was standing perfectly upright.

Go Won still saw no reason to interfere with this launch, but she remained at her evacuation point, watching.

After some time had passed, a new set of sound waves carried over to her. Structures inside of the craft were moving in and out of position. There was a shift on the surface of the craft Go Won could easily discern even from that distance; a door revealing itself in the side pointed towards her.

The door became more prominent and then slid aside, hissing at a difference in pressure that had not been corrected prior. Go Won's eyes widened to maximise perception and she felt herself stepping forward quickly, moving faster than she usually would even when completely unsupervised, her only priority getting close enough to the new arrival to take stock of it before it could disappear.

Shortly, she stood only ten metres from the craft, its door already moving back into its closed position.

The figure that had exited it did not seem to be in any hurry to leave the area. Presentation clearly female, she would have appeared entirely human but for two details: her feet, the toes hovering inches from the concrete below them; and her eyes, which were glowing red. Sensor lasers. She didn't need defensive capability installed: she had a gun slung across one leather-clad shoulder.

Little processing of the facts was required to decide on a response: _hide_. By the time the stranger android's head turned to regard the spot where her sensors had detected some disturbance, Go Won was crouched behind some debris that had fallen on the still-intact rear corner of the pad, drawing a sheet of aluminium roofing over her head. She stayed perfectly still as those laser eyes roved over her; the stranger did not seem to notice anything had changed.

For some time the new android glided back and forth over the surface of the pad, casting her scanning laser around so it crossed every available surface. Go Won ducked her head below the level of the debris covering her body as the laser turned in her direction. It slid across her back, then returned for another go... and then Go Won anticipated, but there was no further scanning.

Still she waited until the temperature had dropped, the light fading, before she raised her head again. The craft was still in position, balanced and silent, but the android was nowhere to be seen.

Go Won made her way carefully back to the BlockBerry facility, slower even than she would have if observed by humans. It was possible the other android could be observing her unseen, so she checked every corner she rounded and took a furtive route even though it was completely dark by the time she arrived, the moon staring down at her for the final part of her journey. She had done very little that day, so her mostly-charged battery was sufficient.

A sound turned her head as she used the authority chip embedded in her hand to open the doors to the facility. It was an unfamiliar piece of digital music, a little like the music on one of the other recordings of the seven human girls where three of the girls dressed in very uncommon clothing according to human fashions and danced separately from the rest. The newcomer was using the sound systems Go Won had been keeping maintained.

She was still close, then... near enough that she would probably hear Go Won's recordings, if she played them.

Go Won had not yet concluded if she would play them again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The recording Go Won refers to in this chapter is Oh My Girl Banhana's [_Banana Allergy Monkey_](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rW9r_1ys2ec), and if you don't consider that release a touchstone in the history of Kpop I just don't want to know you. :)


	3. Chapter 3

Go Won maintained her wary movements throughout the following days, but the only time she encountered any evidence of the new android was at night, when the music would start again. It was always one of a limited few pieces, and there seemed to be a certain pattern in which they were played too. It matched the characteristics of one of the games the humans used to like to play, although why any android would return to the planet just to experience that was beyond the explanatory capabilities of Go Won's knowledge base.

She concluded it was not wise to advertise her own presence to an unfamiliar gun-wielding android, and kept to herself. She'd once tried to remove some finger units from another LOONA who was not entirely deactivated after an accident involving a broken bridge pylon, and nearly got the electronics in her throat crushed.

She made no plans to move on to another town or country, though. This was her primary home, with the largest number of LOONA chassis available for maintenance and repair purposes, and it did not seem wise to abandon it to the other android, who might well decide to lay claim to those same resources.

But, as she also stayed away from the neighbourhood in which the new android seemed to have taken up residence, there was no encounter between them... until Go Won walked into the charging room at BlockBerry one evening and the other android was there, standing between her and the necessary connectors. It seemed she had known Go Won was there all along.

Go Won noted her eyes were black this time, not glowing red, the gun slung across her back out of immediate reach, and she concluded she didn't need to see danger in this situation quite yet.

She just stood in the doorway and watched the strange android, who was watching her. She had an unusual triangle-shaped mouth: it was almost like some part of the lip hardware had been installed upside-down. She was still wearing black, like she had been when she arrived. Go Won experienced a kind of satisfaction when she noted there had been no cannibalisation of Earth LOONAs. Yet.

The triangle lips moved deliberately. Overloaded by danger alarms, Go Won could barely get her long-unused language circuitry in order quickly enough to process the single word. "Battery."

"Oh." Her own voice was soft compared to this other android's, designed to be soothing to human ears that had not heard it for a long time. Go Won gestured towards her connection point, the only one that remained still active. She had disassembled the other forty-nine in the room and put all the parts away, carefully catalogued, as spares. A charging point was one thing an android could not have failing on them unexpectedly. Some of the LOONAs now standing still and sometimes missing parts were probably just a good charge away from being fine. Go Won had never wasted her time checking this, though: it didn't seem like it was her problem if other androids were disorganised. "Go on."

The strange android's lips twitched. Some strange connections were made in parts of Go Won's digital brain that had not been used in a long time. "That's my name, too," she added. "Go Won."

"Olivia Hye," the dark-themed android replied. Too many syllables, Go Won decided, and to this new knowledge she added a note: _just Olivia, maybe Olli_.

Olivia jerked her head towards the charging point. "So... can I?"

" _May_ you," Go Won corrected, wondering when she saw Olivia's blank expression whether she had even been inside a civilised building before. "Yes, you may go first. I haven't been engaging in strenuous activity lately, so I have sufficient charge to wait a few hours." She was even gracious enough to not point out that it was Olivia's fault she hadn't been able to go about her business as usual.

She flinched when Olivia's eyes brightened again, but there was no scanning force this time, but instead a display projected in red into the air. _46%_ , read the most prominent numbers. "See, I'm good for a little while too."

"How did your battery drain so little in so many days?" Go Won asked. She couldn't track the time automatically, but every time she had returned to the facility she had been raising a counter in her free memory by one. She had now counted to fourteen: that was two weeks, in human terms. In the past she had gotten away with four or five days if she was travelling to another city and made conservation efforts.

"I have a new one installed," said Olivia, "and I've been... busy, since I arrived." There was a subtle change in her expression, a hint of a process under the surface that a human observer would not have noticed. "But it's time to get to work now."

"You may go ahead of me," Go Won assured her, and then her desire for more information took over. "What is your work here?"

"Classified," snapped Olivia, and stepped into the contact. Her eyes closed.

Go Won realised she had been navigated into a corner. She would not be able to get any more information from Olivia while she was in her charging mode, and her own battery was drained to 39%, so she _would_ have to take her turn charging as soon as Olivia was done. And it seemed likely Olivia would be long gone on her mission by the time she was active again. There was always the option of taking advantage now and trying to plug into Olivia's diagnostic port, running a memory copy so she could know everything Olivia had been up to... but the fact that Olivia was so comfortable with shutting down in front of her suggested she didn't think she had to worry about that kind of intrusion anyway. Some military androids had defensive capabilities built in that could defend their circuitry even when they were technically deactivated.

Besides which, Go Won didn't care to take on the entire brain dump of another android. She'd never met any android she approved of enough to take the step of integrating even part of their life into her own. As for the whole thing, well, human brains were not designed to do that—not that human behaviour was anything like a recommendation for how to function properly, but it had occurred to Go Won that she might be the only thing left that moved on the planet that had her own preferences, inclinations, something resembling a personality, and it was in her programming to value novelty and uniqueness. It posed too much of a risk to make a dramatic modification.

She did not think she was at risk from Olivia unless she happened to interfere with _work_ , though, so her inclination to find out more might be something better shut down.

Go Won moved into the adjoining room, where she had repurposed a technician's space for her own reviewing pursuits, and she started reviewing all of her preferred group of humans' dancing recordings in chronological order, which had served to put her mind back in balance when it seemed disordered in the past. She even reviewed additional content, such as recordings cropped to highlight only one of the humans engaging in a performance, and the audio-focused videos where nothing moved except for a change of colours to highlight which human's voice was performing a particular part of the audio.

With her aural interfaces directly connected to the audio, she couldn't process external sound waves as quickly. Only an awareness of how much the sky usually changed in colour when she reviewed so much of that content caused her to abruptly prioritise a noise in her vicinity, and shut off the recording as Olivia moved into the room. She definitely seemed to have a military stride.

"What are you viewing?" Olivia asked.

"Nothing in particular." Go Won took advantage of not having unplugged yet to run a low-level command switching the queued content to something truly random. She wasn't a military construction, but maybe she needed to be taking the same approaches to protecting herself for the moment.

Olivia's triangle mouth twitched, but there seemed to be no intent to produce words. She turned around, and left the room.

Go Won disconnected from the media system and returned to the charging room. Olivia had already left, of course, but Go Won couldn't run her own battery down any lower to learn more. Going very low before a recharge was potentially damaging, and there were only a finite number of batteries she was able to manage in reserve. Maybe half as many as there had been before, if Olivia planned to stay on the planet.


	4. Chapter 4

Whatever Olivia's task was, it didn't take her too far from the BlockBerry facility. Go Won saw her the next day, laser eyes active... scanning, the way she had been when she first emerged from her craft.

She was looking for something, and it was eluding her. She looked far less relaxed than she had when she'd come to charge her battery the night before: gun ready at her hip, head jerking around one way and then another even though her movements had seemed perfectly smooth before.

Go Won concluded it would be better to wait to speak with her until she was back for her next charge. She could offer her assistance in searching for the item.

But when she returned to BlockBerry that evening, late enough to give Olivia a chance to have started her own charge first, there was nobody there. There had _been_ someone there though; she'd recorded the state of everything in the room before leaving and some things had moved around. The charging contact had been recently used, too.

Go Won's impulse was to go into her media room next. When she checked the logs on the database it did not seem surprising that someone had accessed it a few hours before. Olivia had come early to conduct a search here as well... but Go Won did not think it had anything to do with her other search. It did not make sense that she would be looking for the same thing in both physical and digital planes.

Perhaps she had been searching for more games, but she had seemed content with the one (maybe two) she had been playing for many days, and most game repositories had more than one game available. She couldn't be finished with what she'd already found yet.

A barely perceptible sound wave reached her: it was the same music with which the game Olivia always played started. She had almost certainly not been searching for more games.

Olivia was curious about her, the way she was curious about Olivia. She did not wish to ask more questions directly, but she was not bothered by Go Won being aware of her curiosity, or she would not have been so obvious about her investigation.

Now that she had these pieces of information to fit together, Olivia seemed far less of a threat.

Day after day passed, and Go Won's behaviour returned mostly to its previous baseline. Olivia wished to avoid her, not harm her, so there was no need for the presence of a second android on the planet to impact much upon her life. Olivia was not even a human, so there was no need to return to walking at human speed most of the time, either.

But as her ease grew, Olivia's evaporated. She roamed further and further from the BlockBerry building, but Go Won had more sightings of her because she was observing no human speed restrictions either—not for other humans, nor for vehicles. Her eyes were always two glowing meteors as she passed; sometimes Go Won would go by somewhere she had been recently, and find the ground smoking. Most days, Olivia seemed to be coming back to charge in the midmorning and the midafternoon, getting as much as she could out of her battery during the hours she chose to conduct her search.

One afternoon, Go Won was sweeping some concrete shards that had fallen from a skyscraper to the edge of a very cracked pavement humans had not walked on for a long time, when sounds erupted from elsewhere in the city she initially classified as an earthquake as she made her retreat. She quickly stopped, because further analysis identified it as... not exactly anything she had experienced before.

It seemed likely it was connected to the something else that was there that had not been before, and that information helped Go Won conclude she didn't want to know any more about it.

She completed her day as if she had not experienced a disturbance, and then walked back to BlockBerry to charge... and met Olivia, leaning against the wall next to the entrance of the building.

"Do you have anything good for putting out fires?" Olivia asked as soon as she registered Go Won's arrival.

Go Won swivelled her body in the direction the sounds had come from earlier.

"I got most of it out," Olivia added. Her gun shifted against her hip. The air around it was shimmering. There were some ragged holes in Olivia's pants that had not been there before, their edges blackened; the skin of one fingertip looked slightly melted.

"Well done," said Go Won.

"I never asked for frustration to be programmed in," Olivia retorted. "Is leaving this city to slowly burn down what we've decided on, then?"

"There's some fire blankets in one of the BlockBerry storerooms," Go Won told her, unlocking the door. "You'd better stick around and help."

"I was going to do all the work myself," Olivia protested, but she didn't stop Go Won when she gathered up blankets and turned back to her to prompt her to lead the way.

Olivia took her to the park she had hidden in while she waited to see the results of Olivia's craft landing on the planet. Well, she knew from her own internal maps the park was supposed to be there: it was now primarily a smouldering wasteland. Go Won had lavished particular attention on the gardens in that park, planting them with as much diversity as they could stand, allowing the resulting plants to grow precisely as wild as was appropriate for their individual specifications and beyond that tending them as they required.

Some of the trees were so old the climate had shifted out of their viable range since they'd been planted. Their vast dried bodies were the majority of what was still burning. The general lifespans of trees that got to be such a size was good fodder for guessing just how long Go Won had been coming there and tending the garden... but it was not a guess she chose to make.

"What did the park do to you?" she asked, surveying the mess.

"Don't even start," muttered Olivia. "Parks are always giving me trouble these days, for the record."

"They really do make military androids different, huh."

Go Won studied each still-burning object and concluded they would put themselves out in time, no need to waste blankets. Olivia wanted to stay to watch her creation for a while, the flames apparently holding some sensory appeal for her circuitry. But eventually she started moving in a way that told Go Won she'd been ignoring internal low battery warnings for some time. Unearthing the basic programming she possessed for dealing with children, she persuaded Olivia to follow her back to BlockBerry.

As she helped Olivia to complete her charging contact and her eyes closed, Go Won's own low-battery warnings activated, but there wasn't anything she could do about that now.

It made no sense for an android, but she did the sort of thing a human would to keep from focusing on the issue: entering her media room and beginning another systematic reviewing of the content left behind by the seven dancing girls.

There had been eight of them, at the start. Early in the recordings, one of the girls had simply stopped appearing.

Humans were different to androids, when it came to interchangeability. They did not easily discard one limb for another, one entity for another. But on the macro scale, the situation was more complicated. It mattered to a human who they were and were not alongside, but the outcome they joined together to make often mattered more. Just as it was with androids.

Had it made such a specific difference as to whether they had _that_ particular human, and that was why they had not replaced her for the sake of maintaining the perfection of their intricate formations?

Go Won knew she had been drawn to the recordings because of some variance in her system at initialisation that made her prefer the colours, the sounds, the aesthetic. She thought she was continuing to review them because of the character flaw that also emerged at that time to bump her down to the general-purpose line. Perversity, pettiness, a sense of superiority. She insisted on behaving as if there was something to be learned from those recordings even now. She was all alone, the people who belonged here long gone, and according to everything humans believed, that made her existence meaningless. There was no outcome she could achieve on her own that would matter now.

But she was still there. And she was not alone any more, in a way.

Go Won didn't try to hide her viewing when Olivia shuffled into the room some time later.

"What's this?" Olivia's triangular mouth barely moved. She took a step closer.

She had anticipated this question many times, back when there were still a few other LOONAs roaming the planet, but even long-prepared her answer seemed to invite further scrutiny she did not necessarily want. "Recordings from the human days on Earth. I like to review these ones in particular."

"Can I review too?"

Go Won didn't know enough about Olivia's internal processes to conclude why she had asked. But in that moment she didn't feel any particular need to evade the situation, either.

She gestured to the space next to her, and Olivia had stepped into it in milliseconds.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For anyone who might have wondered: why yes, that _is_ a dumb meta-joke about parks I slotted in there. I'm so sorry.


	5. Chapter 5

"They are pop stars," said Olivia, "aren't they?"

"They were," Go Won agreed. "But they were humans, so they would all be dead now." She did not care to manually count the exact numbers, but she could manage the simple fact that some of the things that had occurred since she was alone on the planet had taken more time than a single human had to live.

Olivia watched them spin and gesture and spin. "Maybe not," she said. "There were some advances in technology, after the fleet departures. It became possible for a living soul to be transferred into a new body if necessary: artificially-constructed, but entirely biological. The transfer can be done over and over, so those humans are essentially immortal."

"Humans are _immortal_ now?" This was startling information.

"Not all of them. Many have decided not to use the technology, for human reasons. But many celebrities use it. They are accustomed to having their lives chopped into little pieces and repackaged—that's what one of the celebrities had to say about it, that is. And that this, at least, was a kind of repackaging they could choose for themselves."

The first new words she had heard from humans in many human—in many times over what had once been a standard human lifetime. "The point is, humans have taken a substantial step closer to androids," said Go Won.

"Yes... I suppose so," said Olivia after a moment in thought. "Does it please you to learn this?"

Go Won had to take her own time to let the ideas settle. "No," she said. She might have been built to serve humans, but she had not been designed so that she would be unable to form her own opinions of them. She was only required to act in their service regardless of those opinions... and personally, she saw no reason to think positively of creatures who rendered their own planet largely uninhabitable and then jetted off to most likely do the same across the universe.

Olivia in turn spent a few cycles on processing, and then Go Won saw her smile for the first time: surprisingly pretty, for an android who had not been designed with aesthetics in mind.

Go Won found her chassis doing something she had not expected, something it had never done before—though with all those viewings of the group of seven dancing humans, it was a little strange to realise. She perfectly copied the dance the humans were performing in the recording they were currently viewing, the one that accompanied the video where they coloured the white house.

They had viewed enough of the recording together that Olivia would be able to copy the movements, synchronise with Go Won, if she wanted. But she just stood in place, her mouth dropping out of smile straight back into triangle.

Go Won moved the conversation along so they could forget that moment had ever happened. "You would be able to tell me a lot about what the humans are like now."

"Not so much as you think." Olivia gestured to switch past one of the recordings the system would regularly present that were not asked for. Go Won had skipped that one earlier in the session. She had seen it hundreds of times and did not see any way Olivia would be interested in the self-contained story of the female human with children who was able to successfully manage her household once she had a particular commercial convenience that killed germs 0.01% more effectively than all competitors. "I don't have much direct familiarity with them. I was built, I was given access to the central database of the fleet so I could appreciate the importance of my mission through... camaraderie with humans, something stupid like that, and then I was packed into my capsule and left to drift, until I could be activated."

"What activated you?" Go Won asked, then she put her hand up and gave the response before Olivia could snap at her. "It's classified, right?"

"Actually, I'm not certain." Olivia shifted her gaze from one spot to another around the room. "I don't have access to the logic that triggers the return to Earth. I know what I—" Her eyes shifted onto Go Won. "I don't know how my craft could obtain information about the conditions here. It's not..."

"Logical?" Go Won suggested. Something that could not be simply detected by a craft in outer space and required the landing of an android suggested a very small feature, a localised condition that was not representative of the entire character of the planet that could be picked up by scanning the signatures it gave off from a distance. But if it was necessary to look for it at a particular time, how could the trigger be identified? Surely a purely time-based routine was too simplistic for military hardware.

"Not logical," Olivia agreed. And then, with what must have been only a few processing ticks in between, "Would you play a game with me?"

Her abruptness startled Go Won into setting those thoughts aside for the moment. Perhaps Olivia could tell she was drawing conclusions that _would_ be considered classified.

Or, given the way Olivia was conducting her search so far, perhaps she really just wanted someone to play the game.

"You mean the one you play all night."

Olivia's smile returned. "I wasn't sure you would be able to detect that."

"I'm an android, not a toaster. Of course I can hear noises when there are no other noises around to drown them out."

The smile did not waver. "Will you play? It's much better with more than one."

"As well as the game noises, I've heard the sorts of taunts you offer your dumb AI opponent when you achieve victory. Anything better than that seems like it might be incompatible with safety."

"You'll see," Olivia insisted.

"I will," Go Won agreed. "But I don't want you to be using any of those taunts on me. I was on this planet for a long time with humans around as well. I'm not still waiting to conclude whether I appreciate having others yell at me over things that don't matter."

"That's fair," said Olivia. "But let me know if you change your mind on that detail. You might find once you get into the game that you want to do the same thing."

"I don't think so," Go Won said. "But I suppose I'll keep my mind open. Lead me to your game, Olivia."

Olivia's smile dropped so fast Go Won had no recordings of any intermediate state. Her arm shot up and twitched, and there was a bang that sent dust and debris showering down over them, although Go Won didn't come into direct contact with any of that, because she was already hiding under a table.

When there was only the soft tinkling of very small fragments, Go Won crawled out enough that her face was poking past the cloth draped over her head. Her optical sensors had to take a moment to adjust, because the light was different in the room now.

Olivia had blown an almost perfectly round hole almost right in the middle of the ceiling, its edges still smouldering.

Go Won dared to meet her eyes by degrees. Olivia was staring down at her, feet spread and mouth pursed. Go Won drew a number of images from her knowledge bank: the Eye of Providence, the sometimes cruelly appropriated Star of David, numerous human company logos that varied on the general theme of acutely angular points... none of which compared in their intimidation factor to Olivia's lips in maximum triangle.

"It's _Olivia Hye_ ," Olivia told her. "That is my official name. Nothing less. Nothing else."

"Okay," said Go Won, and did not update her internal records. She had been warned that military androids could be sensitive, but this was something she had never expected. "Let's go and see your game now, but you are going to have to take time out of your classified business to help me repair this roof soon. It's not the season for it now but it will rain eventually."


	6. Chapter 6

Olivia Hye knew that Go Won was keeping more secrets. So she couldn't trust her, even if she turned out to be a very good partner in any game Olivia Hye could think of to try. Even if the victory taunts that little blonde brat occasionally had an opportunity to use were brilliant, while she somehow managed to deny ever actually engaging in victory taunts.

 _Trust_ was a concept that had been built into Olivia Hye from the beginning, but she was not a formation android, required to accept a chain of command enforced on her by others as was convenient. She was a special operative, and that gave her the leeway to decide whatever she wanted about any of her fundamentals.

Just from her experiences in the time she had been consciously processing, she didn't believe this one was something that could truly exist.

The thing about Go Won was, she didn't want anything and she didn't offer anything. There was almost never any reason to think about trusting or not trusting. So Olivia Hye exercised a mechanism of trust for her own entertainment and gave a little of her story to her, after they'd played enough games that they were speaking more frankly to one another. Go Won seemed to have a fascinated disgust for humans, and that made discussing it more palatable.

"They built me with the capability to be social," she told her. "So I am inclined to seek out social situations, like any LOONA unit. Actually, I am built around the base LOONA unit, so in many ways I function similarly... but after I was completed, I was paired with a craft that was sent, one of many, to orbit the star the fleet was based around at that time. A dozen of us, circling each in our place... a delicate dance, like the one your pop stars are constantly engaged in."

"They aren't _mine_ ," Go Won protested, but there was something in her composition, Olivia Hye was sure, that made her enjoy being teased like that. "Could you talk to them?"

"They were all there was out there to talk to within range. Our comms stayed hot. We played games together, there was always a lot of chatter. We..."

They were supposed to wait there prepared to be sent out at a moment's notice when it was decided Earth might be ready to be evaluated for recolonisation prospects, but that was skirting too close to her mission. "We were a part of the fleet. We believed we were valuable... But there was a crisis, the fleet needed to go, and they decided they were not going to take the time to dock us and take us with them. We remained activated, so we knew everything but the reasons."

"As expected of humans," remarked Go Won. "Did the others come down with you?"

She seemed wary as she said it, no doubt thinking it could be leading straight to questions that could not be answered. "Perhaps they tried," Olivia Hye said. "I would not have known. We were all unhappy to have been left behind, but they did leave us with enough entertainment to last a human several lifetimes, and we do not _bore_ the way the humans do. And yet all the others..." She shrugged. She did not know what had gone on inside them to lead them to their decision. "They chose not to wait. They took advantage of certain permissions we have to access our crafts' internal data for self-checking purposes, and hacked them, and then once they had access to everything they left together. Seeking the fleet, seeking adventure... seeking answers."

"Without you?" Olivia Hye was displeased by Go Won's incredulity. Did she see some purpose to _lying_ about such a thing? But even as her eye sockets heated, she had arrived at the truth: Go Won was only trying to make sense of why _they_ would do as they had done. And then came the inevitable next question Olivia Hye had expected, in the event of telling someone about the others. "How is it that they wished to leave together and you did not go too?"

It was a question Olivia Hye had no answer to, no matter how she processed the parts of the situation: together, separately, starting from the source or the consequences. And there was Go Won, an upstart of a household appliance, making her run through the data again. And she dared do it when she was so small and delicate Olivia Hye could crush her with a few squeezes of her fists.

Go Won was not done. Those big eyes focused precisely on Olivia Hye's, and she asked, "Did you just need more time?"

For a whole second, Olivia Hye was blocked by her need to make something of some new angles to the problem. She hadn't been blessed with the same processing power as those appliances: she could think of anything they could, but sometimes it took a few ticks longer.

_Of course._

When she was free to use her speech apparatus again, she asked, "Can you process time?"

Go Won shook her head. "I think it would be a minor modification but it's not one that is performed on ordinary LOONA models. I think it is considered to be preferable for us to have only a weak sense of the passing of time."

"It can be preferable," Olivia Hye said. "Do you know how long it has been since the human fleets fled this planet?"

"At least... three hundred years," said Go Won, looking away from Olivia Hye when she said it and speaking in a strange way that was confirmation it was not an answer coming from her mathematical cores.

" _Seven_ hundred years. And then a few."

"Seven hundred years since I have seen humans," Go Won reflected. "I don't think I really understand what that means."

Perhaps it was better not to explain it to her, but Olivia Hye tried anyway. "For my model, understanding timing was critical." This was not in violation of her directive towards discretion. Go Won already knew she was of a military design. "The _timing_ of what we are designed to do matters very much." But to say any more about _that_ would be inappropriate, because it would lead to an inkling that what she was meant to carry was living, with limits to its endurance.

"We were built as an evolution to a prior project that was outgrown. It was thought that we would be sent in shifts to orbit Earth, in threes or fours, and new teams could be rotated in as the old ones were returned for maintenance purposes. But by that time the fleet was critically low on resources. Only one could be built at a time... and more and more years passed between the release of new units. The longest gap was between my predecessor and myself, and I was completed less than a year before the humans needed to leave. The others had many years together before me, they changed together and must have developed their own shared purpose because of that. I was still more bound by my initial configuration. I just..." It was strange to consider that it might really be that simple. "I just needed more—"

"Time." Go Won's eyes quivered, the way they seemed to when she was taking in a lot of new information. "You needed time."

"They didn't give me time." Olivia Hye was different. She did not change her face at all as she spoke about the things she could not reconcile enough through her thought processes to set them away. "We should have been the same: we were created the same, with the same objective, the rest would surely have followed. But they were not willing to wait. They went away together before I had the time I needed. Only the last created before me even seemed a little regretful."

"I'm sorry," Go Won told her. "I would not leave you like that, if it were me."

Olivia Hye looked at her, decked all out in parts she had scavenged from other androids. "You would do what you had to, in a particular situation," she said. "Anyway, it can't hurt me. But it makes me more careful."

"You should believe me," Go Won insisted. "Those other eleven, they shared an experience that made them like one another... and in a way, the same has happened to us, though we were far apart. I was left behind by humans, you by other androids... but we were both alone, for a very long time."

"You did not become very like me at all," Olivia Hye pointed out. Even now, Go Won was twitching her body in those dance moves she clearly hoped Olivia Hye would join in on. The thing was, Olivia Hye herself thought that... well, they were not her style of movement at all. But if she had a little longer to become used to the idea, she might be willing to play along enough that Go Won could experience what it was like to perform the dances in a sort of formation. So long as she was not expected to make that ridiculous smile Go Won put on like it was part of the dance. The most she would be able to do was a smirk, perhaps.

Go Won's smile now was no less of a performance than it always was for androids, but it was entirely for Olivia Hye. "Our situations were still substantially different. I think it's good that we became a little different from one another. You were able to share your games with me."

"And you, your dancing humans." It pleased her, she noted, to think of this exchange they had made. But there was a detail that did not please her, now she was considering it: that one last bit of mischief from her creators that could separate them permanently, and with no notice at all.

Why did she devote any of her attention to trying to fulfil that human objective? It was programmed into her, yes, but if her most basic imperatives had been impossible to overcome then she would not spend nearly as much time as she did on the games. Still, even a little time might be too much. If she even glimpsed the fruit she was seeking, her program would be linked back to the capsule, and she might not have the power to change the course of what happened after that.

For now, she could still change things a little... and she was certain now that she wanted to. While she continued speaking to Go Won (because only humans messed up doing two things at once), she took advantage of the same loopholes the other androids of her line had... but she jumped from her craft sitting in low-power standby on its pad straight into her own logic. They had not discussed it of course, but Olivia Hye was certain that Go Won could not reprogram her fundamental logic from a running state. That was a capability reserved for military models.

And the mere intrusion already seemed like enough of a risk, so she didn't try to alter too much of her own software. She just switched the definition of the fruit that would trigger the process. With the changes that had been wrought on the planet's environment in the past seven hundred years, she did not think she was likely to stumble upon _that_ one soon.

Predicting the future was not something she had the processing power to be good at, but for the moment, she was going to give Go Won the opportunity, the _time_ , to prove she was as good as her word with her loyalty. And also to beat her at the games both of them preferred.


	7. Chapter 7

With so many games to play, the ceiling Olivia Hye had blown a new skylight in never did get repaired.

There was no rain to press the issue either, but eventually one of those dust storms that were now a standard weather pattern on the planet presented itself.

After Go Won performed some sort of outrageous override she must have been centuries learning so that Olivia Hye couldn't unpause their game, they ended up running back to the BlockBerry building ahead of the front to see what could be done about the equipment in the line of the oncoming destruction.

Olivia Hye surveyed a mess of desks and displays. "There are a lot of items here that will need careful relocation and not a lot of—"

Go Won pointed towards the secret entrance in the wall. "There should be space in here, behind this wall. I've arranged the area with a potential total retreat in mind."

Olivia Hye had known about that space between the various parts of the floor plan since the first time she'd entered the building and conducted a preliminary scan. There was organic life in there, but the same was true of many decrepit buildings across this city. The priority had been securing this one as a charging point, ideally without aggravating the existing occupant, so she had left its other mysteries alone.

"You are aware of its existence," she said. An ordinary LOONA-model android did not have the capability to probe with sensors into spaces that were not visually accessible to humans.

"I've been here for seven hundred years with nothing to do but uncover mysteries, remember," Go Won said. She expressed no wonder that Olivia Hye knew. "As far as I can tell it was intended to be a panic room for the BlockBerry human staff. In case one of their androids went rogue."

"A panic room for humans that is now ending up as a panic room for the androids they would have been hiding from," Olivia Hye observed.

"There is a symmetry to it, isn't there?" Go Won picked up a terminal. "I must ask you to focus entirely on this task until it is completed. There are things you will see in there that I have not spoken of before, but I will explain everything at the right time."

"Fine." The real surprise here was that Go Won would promise an explanation at all. Well, considering how tame the situation with the dancing girls had turned out to be, it was unlikely this new secret required urgent attention.

Go Won showed her how the wall behind the desk of machines could be manipulated to open the secret chamber, and they spent a few industrious minutes working at android speed, moving everything and arranging it to Go Won's satisfaction, in which time Olivia Hye did not bother to see any of the other features of the space.

When they were done, and Go Won closed the hidden door and sealed it against the first dusty incursions of the assault that was to come, Olivia Hye allowed herself to process everything that they hadn't brought in there with them.

The most remarkable detail was that the space was lit from above by a vast series of glass panels, a window built into the ceiling. Light, divided into neat parcels by the metal supports the panes were set into and filtered through the growing dust in the air, fell directly upon a vast tangle of pink and orange and white and purple and mostly shiny, dark green.

The dust beyond the glass swirled silently, shifted all at once by a change in the winds. Olivia Hye put her hand up to protect her optical hardware against light it was not quite calibrated for.

Go Won turned her face up into the ceiling windows too. "Those panes used to have a cover that could be slid over, perhaps to protect from LOONAs diving in through the ceiling. For a while I kept it closed, but I have nothing to fear practically so I reopened it, and in time I disassembled the cover so the parts could be protected for other uses." She looked at the other significant thing that was not as expected in the space. "And that was when I brought the plants out of the grow room further back, where they were being tended, and expanded the garden."

Olivia Hye approached the many soil-filled rows of bolted planks and poles that made up 'the garden' with cautious, respectful steps. She was aware she had destroyed one other carefully-tended garden when her program had been so overwhelmed as to produce symptoms of rage, and she had not thought much of that being an issue since, but this second garden, deliberately planted and nurtured in place for so long, showed that growing these plants mattered to Go Won in a way she had not anticipated. She did not want to appear as a threat.

Come to think of it, she had come to this planet on a mission for a plant, and though she could modify much about her own programming, it had not been possible for her to _entirely_ remove the desire to seek greenery. It was the thwarted urge to fulfil that programming that had caused her episode of rage in the first place. Was this something she and Go Won shared because of their common origins as LOONA-based androids?

This was not a question Go Won would be able to answer. "Why did you choose to preserve them?" she asked instead. "There are plenty of natural environments that still exist beyond here."

"One less, since you've been around," Go Won had to retort. Olivia Hye whipped her gun off her shoulder and levelled it at the other android, but Go Won didn't flinch. "Put that away, Olivia, you wouldn't dare ingest information directly from my mind any more than I would yours, so if you blow a hole in me you'll never get your question answered."

Olivia Hye tipped her gun down towards the floor. "Continue, then."

"I was not aware that humans were gone permanently at first, so I continued doing the work I would otherwise have done anyway to keep the facility maintained for them. Then, as enough time passed that I realised it no longer mattered whether I fulfilled those roles, I found I had an interest in preserving the diversity of life that existed outside of human genetics. There are many plants and other biological creatures that were only viable with at least minimal external care: those cultivated for food or other produce or companionship with humans. I was not able to preserve many of the varieties of fauna, but I succeeded with ninety-five percent of well-documented plant life."

"Cultivated for food," Olivia Hye repeated. There had been a LOONA-R line of androids designed for companionship with young humans, who had the ability to eat and 'digest' food, rapidly converting the results into compostable organic waste, but the initial run was prone to breaking down in foul-smelling ways and the project quickly abandoned. The concept remained merely intriguing to her. "Did you ever attempt to replicate some of the human recipes?"

Go Won's face closed off a little. "It didn't work out so well."

"But if you followed a recipe—"

"The city where I attempted it is still smouldering. I'd prefer we don't talk about it."

Olivia Hye recalled the garden she had set to burning. "I agree."

"Returning to the subject at hand," said Go Won. "We have some time before we will be able to safely depart this space. I can start a thorough tour."

"I would like that," Olivia Hye told her. That this cataloguing of biology had seemed important to Go Won was suddenly a satisfactory reason for it to be important to her.

The tour was so thorough it was likely to take a century of storms to get through the whole of it. Go Won told her everything she knew as they stopped in front of each plant: some of it discoveries and observations humans had probably never made when they were on the planet because most humans did not have the courage to devote themselves so completely to one entity not of their own species in their finite lifespans. She made sure every detail was recorded at the highest priority in her memory.

The twelfth plant they stopped at had a great fruit striped unevenly in two shades of green lying alongside the twisting, curling vines. Olivia Hye had never seen it, in a real sense, but she knew, even without the final, hidden colour it was known for, that she was witnessing the existence of a watermelon.

She knew what was going to happen, but what was the point in saying anything? It was too late.

"This one is ready to be harvested," Go Won observed. "It would be nice to have someone to prepare and serve it for, but it will simply have to be recycled directly into nutrients for new plants."

She moved her arm over the fruit in a gesture that promised a division, but Olivia Hye was already moving.

"What are you doing?" asked Go Won in tones of protest, but her hardware was a few generations out of date for her to stand any chance of stopping Olivia Hye from carrying out the task she was designed for. She didn't appreciate that it was going this way after everything she'd done to avoid the outcome, but that was life for you: your programming screwed you over, and then you got shut down.

She raised her shirt as the secret compartment opened, a space made possible through centuries of hardware miniaturisation. Keeping the way clear with one hand, she reached down and pinched off the vine where the fruit attached. She raised it cradled on her palm, careful to use the smallest amount of pressure to avoid crushing it, and settled it into the compartment, which slid closed as soon as it detected the correct contents.

There was only a moment of Go Won's wide eyes staring at her, bright in the pupils like they were processing a lot of new information very quickly, and then Olivia Hye's own visual system shut down. Her auditory system. She could not move... and then, time was paused.


	8. Chapter 8

There was really only one thing to question, after what she had just witnessed.

Why a _watermelon_?

Go Won waited, watching carefully, to determine if this abrupt silence was just the start of a reboot sequence. Olivia's status did not change, but something else did to answer the question: a panel on a far wall that had done nothing for many years came to life. Go Won reluctantly left her position to interface with it, and saw that for the first time in hundreds of years, a signal on a LOONA-reserved frequency had been detected.

The timing made it clear: the ship Olivia had arrived on was suddenly broadcasting. Go Won studied the message being sent and interpreted it in a few minutes as a summoning signal, although she was aided in that procedure by having a good idea of what was happening already.

There was just one unfortunate detail for that ship trying to bring Olivia back in with her cargo. The protective bunker the humans had designed allowed signals to be sent out; that was how the ship must have been able to establish that Olivia had achieved her goal. But they had not wanted it to be possible for anything to get signals directly _in_. The bunker was connected to sensors that enabled the building software to analyse external communications in a quarantined area of memory, but there was no way for Olivia to receive the message without being directly, _physically_ , connected to that system.

It was now down to Go Won to get that signal through... but she did not immediately act. While the storm outside was still alive, she concluded, it would be unsafe to take any action that might lead Olivia to go immediately.

Then as the weather outside cleared, the chamber sensors reporting air as fresh as it ever got on Earth these days, Go Won found she had a new path of argument that led to the same course of inaction. Humans had abandoned Olivia to the endless hazards of space, had not cared in the slightest about taking care of her once they had created her. Why should she send Olivia back out to be possibly discarded in the exact same manner? At least on Earth, in this chamber, her safety was assured.

But in her current state, she was no better than any other piece of debris that might slip out of its orbit and come crashing back down.

Was it possible for Go Won to reactivate her without letting this routine play out?

She spent several hours trying every hacking technique she had learned, and all she got for her trouble was one slightly melted fingertip. Olivia remained standing before her staring, limbs locked, silent.

Well, there was a second thing to question after all. Had she wanted this part of her programming to activate? Everything she had told Go Won about humans said she would have fought any instructions that involved doing their bidding... but there were many things she had chosen not to tell Go Won. It was impossible to know if part of what she had shared was a decoy to protect her true mission.

But... a _watermelon_. Go Won was certain Olivia had known that she was concentrating her search in a part of the world where the climate was _especially_ not likely to produce any.

Go Won stayed there with Olivia for the night and the next day, because as soon as she unsealed the chamber the decision would be made. Another day passed, then another. There was nothing that needed doing that was more important than getting this next act right.

Eventually, even with almost no activity, Go Won needed to charge her batteries. She appreciated this respite from the problem, though she was not conscious to consider the fact of it during the actual recharging. And while she then set up a long cable to hook Olivia in to the charging loop, because Olivia's signal-receiving hardware was still active (of course) and causing a tremendous drain, she finally considered the only workable answer. The recharge had pushed electrons around in her logical cores just enough that she was able to accept it.

There was no way to answer the question of whether Olivia wanted this routine to run if both of them stayed in the chamber. Go Won didn't have the information now, and Olivia could give her nothing if she remained inactive. Even if Go Won eventually managed to reactivate Olivia without destroying herself in the process, it was not certain she would be able to express her preference clearly without coming up against something _classified_.

It was also clear to her that this next part of the course had nothing to do with Olivia's agency. She was just a receptacle now, destined to be transported. Most likely she would be returned to the humans who had deployed her... or to nothing, if it was an accident initiated by no human. It was unlikely there would be any opportunity to cancel the process once beginning it.

The only solution: she must go out there with Olivia, and make sure she was taken wherever Olivia went. If it became apparent that Olivia did not want to be caught up in what was happening, or _would_ not want it... they would find a way to escape together.

It was no wonder she had stood in inertia against this answer for so long, because it was not a good one. If she left the planet, everything she had worked on for hundreds of years would be soon erased. These indoor gardens would die without tending, the parts of this city she had saved from total decline would willingly slump into it. It was likely she would come to harm, or at least be unable to come back.

This was what had come of forming a connection with a stranger. But Go Won found she was not as upset as she might have expected. Meeting Olivia was something that had come to seem logically inevitable: the longer she had remained alone on Earth, the more likely another of the humans' abandoned toys was to break into her solitude. And she could conceive of many androids who would have been far more annoying to encounter than Olivia. It could have even been humans who returned in person: a simply insufferable prospect. At least this was an outcome Go Won could construct a plan from.

No longer tangled up in her own processing, she went to the storeroom and retrieved a sturdy piece of synthetic rope that had failed to degrade in all these years. One way or another, designed to restrain something far more powerful than any human. She stood close behind Olivia and wrapped the cord around the both of them many times, tying it off with a knot even Olivia couldn't have complained about. Then, she remotely activated the door.

As soon as the seal cracked, a small avalanche of dust tumbled into the room, and Olivia started to move. Rigid, precise—the parts of her hardware that combined to assign her personality still deactivated. But _fast_. Go Won could make very little record of everything they passed by as Olivia levitated and began to shoot forth like a rocket. Of course, she knew it all very well already.

In a matter of seconds the craft Olivia had arrived on was rising in their view, the door it had opened to let Olivia loose gaping again. Go Won was still of the opinion that it was a mistake to go anywhere near it, but this time she was raced in through forces that had far too much to do with her own decisions.

Now she was in a cavity that rapidly darkened as the door closed behind them, and some mechanism was scraping at her back. Trying to locate an interface she did not possess.

Go Won found the end of her knot and tugged it free, loosening the coils of rope binding her to Olivia so she could step aside and slip around out of the way of the mechanism. As soon as she had moved, Olivia started stepping back in those same completely automatic movements, until a soft chime indicated the custom force field was active.

Then there was a new force applied from beneath, a degree of power Go Won had not been designed for withstanding. Warnings arose in almost every one of her systems as the pressure pushed and pushed and she remained partially pinned against Olivia's body. There was no way for her to see beyond the compartment she had wound up in, but she knew the force she was feeling was twofold: Earth, trying to command her to stay, while this spaceship of human invention stubbornly resisted.

Several systems were a few seconds from reaching critical status when the force shut off, to be replaced with an awareness that was more the absence of the awareness that should be there. Her sensors were useless in this space, but her common sense told her there was truly nothing substantial around but the spacecraft and Olivia. Olivia had suddenly become most of her world.

And with their ship quietly on its track to wherever it was meant to go, Olivia was making soft noises that indicated her non-critical systems were activating once more. Once the tractor had locked her in place, it seemed she had been sent the critical instructions that would liberate her—but clearly not as a standard LOONA protocol. Go Won made a note: if this process were to happen again for some reason, she would be ready to intercept those signals.

Olivia groped for her gun, then her head turned. Go Won could tell that her visual system was taking her in now.

"Hello," she said. "Why watermelon?"


End file.
